Sunday, 24 September 2017

Yo, how's it going. I meant to post last week, had a draft saved, didn't feel like I had enough to talk about, so here's both weeks in one. Hope you've been well.

Synchronization:

I've come up with a system to measure the length of an animation in frames, which allows me now to change between speed loops seamlessly, provided the loops share a common frame, and to expand on this I can now assign sounds to individual frames of the animation based on these calculations, rather than my old method of recording a ¬3 second sound loop that I'd restart every time the loop started and just hope they stay in synch.

In short:
I managed to rig up seamless shifting between sex loops and a crude tracker-like sound engine for sex scenes.

Sound:

Made some field recordings this week, mixed, mastered and added to the game. Added 235 new sound effects in the last 7 days. Sex scenes are sounding fucking KINO right now, and there's more to come.

Text Boxes:

Re-did all the text boxes, gave each major character their own color scheme. It's hard to get too excited about some new colors and slight transparency, but it's an improvement nonetheless.
Working on Portraits this weekend as well as general story progression. The level plays out pretty well and polished until the 50% mark right now, but gets pretty utilitarian after that. The meat and bones are both there, they just need assembling.

Made a change to how I store and retrieve text boxes and portraits, now storing them under character names and labeling them with the emotions conveyed rather than a numbering system for each.
This means I can set "Show "Cibil", Emotion "Sad" and tell at a glance in editor what I've set to appear, rather than "Show "1", Emotion "8" as before. Variables can hold Strings, who the fuck knew?

Portraits:

Portraits are up this week, as soon as I have whittled down the number I'll need to the minimum. Learned my lesson during the demo creation- it turns out that adding 2 or 3 variants of a smile takes something away from the feeling of abstract representation by adding too many slight variants.

One important development is that I've decided to discontinue the player-character portrait, as I feel it doesn't add anything valuable, and unnecessarily colors how the line is delivered.

Music:Added two new tracks and working on a third- a more upbeat version of the main theme.

Friday, 8 September 2017

Made the most fun upgrade to a key system in a while and I'm eager to share it:

Before in H-Gameplay we had the blinking cursor up and down telling you to hammer those keys.Each time you did so you'd add +1 to your stamina bar until you reached the top, and if you were lucky the scenes changed at the around 25, 50 and 80 stamina points to get faster as you neared the end. This was cool and all, but I think I've made things better.

First of all, rather than one position at 3 speeds, certain scenes will be DELUXE (currently thinking two expanded encounters like this per level), and will have 3 to 4 positions at 4 speeds each, as well as end scenes to each, and using the aforementioned JIZZOMETER, this also means 3 or 4 varied endings. As you can imagine this is a lot of work, but it's so damn satisfying.

WIP showing off a Deluxe scene and the new transitions

About the new system:

My system now recognises the speed at which you are pressing UP/DOWN and raises or lowers your speed accordingly, and as such the speed of the animation. This isn't like changing the speed on a flash loop, either, with the same number of frames just being played quicker and going from 30fps to 60 (how sexy)! Each postion has 4 distinct animations with varied thrusts, depth and sometimes reaction...

She's such a nice girl, anon, don't treat her this way.

I had to experiment with weighting in the end to make sure the speed, and as such the animation, didn't change every couple of seconds as it did when I just used the raw data (time between button presses) to determine scene choice. It was chaotic, the animation restarting before it could complete made everything jerky and unenjoyable.

Now it's fairly simple, if you start to drop in speed for 12 consecutive button presses, your speed will lower, ditto if you speed up, raising or lowering until reaching the category your average speed is in.Higher speed charges your JIZZOMETER faster, but also charges stamina quicker, so just like in real life, if you go too hard at it, you're gonna need to slow down, stop moving and think about Chandler's knees if you want to postpone the finale.

Of course if you don't feel like doing any of this, or maybe you want to fap in peace without being betrayed by clicking and clacking, I'm adding a semi-handsfree H-Game mode, that starts and stops charging with a single button press each.

UI upgrades:

As well as changing the systems, I added scene transitions bringing you into H-scenes and switching between the Left and Right scenes. You can see the latter of these changes in the top gif above.

That's it from me, it's been a week of mostly animating (Six four-stage animations making up most of two deluxe scenes), and I don't want to just show all the content because that'd spoil all the surprise!After tonight I'll be back to working on the scripting for the main story, filling in sprite animations and beginning to fill out the text. I hope the weekend treats you well, have a good one!Oko

Saturday, 2 September 2017

Art update:

As I'd hoped last time, this week I've gotten a lot of the base level scripting out of the way; the level itself can be completed from start to finish, albeit with a lot of placeholder dialog to fill in later.I'm keeping the script ajar in case a neat animation idea builds upon it.

Because I managed to get done what I hoped for this week, and a little more, I've decided to reward myself with a couple of days of animating sex scenes, since they're easily my favourite part.I've also re-done the level art to remove the previous comic-line outlined assets and replace them with nicer, better shaded and outline-free stuff.

I'm not exactly the best in the rotoscope business, but comparing my work from January:

To my stuff from this week:

I'm pretty happy with how it's coming along.Really looking forward to finishing 1.3 and getting it out there.

Additional changes:

Some changes to H-gameplay also;So the original H-""""game"""" was a button-mash until complete, letting you rest then and hit space at your leisure to finish. Not bad, but feels a little pointless I guess.So I've added a couple of mechanics to this to make it feel worthwhile sticking around in scenes to grind a little before the end:

Dialog plays during scenes:

depending on the girl and her personality or how she feels about the player. These are just to add a little player encouragement.>tfw qt3.14 synthetic waifu calls your name during sex>"harder anon"Hnnnng.

These are currently set to once every 10 seconds or so, and change depending on how close you are to finishing, and doesn't feel too spammy, but in case you disagree I'll add an option to turn them off.

New Gauge:

Without wanting to be crude, it's essentially aJIZZOMETER.

You charge it throughout the game by choosing perverted lines of dialogue or taking lewd actions, unlocking / viewing CGs and generally charges throughout sex scenes, giving the player some reason to want to savour scenes.

The higher this Meter3 gauge is, the more mess you're going to create when you purge the meter by slamming that space bar at the end of sex scenes.A lot of us play these games to edge, so why not let the PC do the same and have this influence the end result?

WIP Scene showing Dialog and Meter functions

That's it from me, my dudes.Hope you're having a good weekend. Take it easy.